https://revistas-fonseca.com/index.php/2172-9077/article/view/603/562
Tracking shots are a question of morality.” This was Jean Luc Godard’s response to a shot in the film Kapo, in which the viewer is brought up close to the body of a Holocaust victim who has just killed herself on an electric fence. He is pointing out that although technology makes this shot possible, it is a perspective that is not human(e). All technologies have the potential to alter how humans perceive, organize, and value their world. One of these, virtual reality (VR), is especially effective in increasing empathy. Whether or not virtual production methods might also be used as a “moral” agent in filmmaking is yet to be determined.Meant to provoke discourse and encourage future artistic and scientific experimentation, this paper describes the artistic process behind creating our 2D short film, Fly Angel Soul shot entirely in a responsive virtual mis-en-scene utilizing three types of virtual cameras: a fly, an angel, and a human/soul, each of which sees and moves differently. We created a novel cinematic language at the intersection of theater, film, and video games. Our intention was to heighten empathy for the main character, Sebastian, a gay man who, having lived a peripatetic life, receives a diagnosis of AIDS in Mali at the beginning of the epidemic. At the same time, the film offers viewers the opportunity to consider their own embodied (and mortal) state. To contextualize the hypothetical potential for a VR-informed cinematic language to promote empathy, we also review key philosophical and neuropsychological bases for VR’s pro-social effects and the neuropsychological bases for empathy in film. We suggest that cinema informed by spatial computing might also allow audiences to experiment with and rehearse new pro-social forms of embodiment and new ways of relating in our computer-mediated world. https://revistas-fonseca.com/index.php/2172-9077
Illya Szilak 